[mdlug] External Hard Drives: Mounting, Unmounting, Partial Mounting?

[Elisa Gomez]

First, sorry I've missed the last two meetings!
Hopefully you'll see my shining happy face again in
February.

Second, I am having all sorts of difficulty with this
usb external hard drive that my mom just gifted me
with. First, I want to say that I don't want to run
another OS on here and boot into this occasionally or
do anything fancy unless it's necessary to get this to
work properly -- I just want to be able to save/back
up data to the external drive . . . Kind of like if I
had a folder on my desktop that magically had 320gigs
of space in it.

But for whatever reason, Ubuntu (Gutsy) seems to only
be partially recognizing the drive. I've labelled it
(msdos) and formatted it (ext2) with gparted. At
least, I *think* I have. It shows up in gparted as
/dev/sdb as a seperate item without a mountpoint and
this is what I get when I run df -k in terminal:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available
Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             16468952   8821640   6810728 
57% /
varrun                  513208       148    513060  
1% /var/run
varlock                 513208         0    513208  
0% /var/lock
udev                    513208        84    513124  
1% /dev
devshm                  513208         0    513208  
0% /dev/shm
lrm                     513208     34696    478512  
7% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1             41094232  25192552  15901680 
62% /media/IBM_PRELOAD

So it doesn't actually seem to be there. Or am I
misreading the output? It also doesn't show up
graphically anywhere, as a desktop icon, as an option
in the Places menu, etc. I can't save to it if I
create a new file and Save As. Also, in gparted, the
drive is showing up as 298gigs instead of 320gigs,
which makes me feel like something windows related is
installed on there.

I'm having similar mounting problems with my camera --
it worked the first couple of times but now it seems
to only partially mount -- it'll get recognized, but
then it'll freeze up and g-thumb (which runs
automatically) will claim that there's no camera
mounted. Like, what the heck am I doing wrong here?
Any ideas? Should I be going about this external drive
issue differently?

Lastly, Lessig released The Future of Ideas under a
creative commons license, which I thought was pretty
cool. Check it out here: http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html


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